New Bill in Congress Targets Teachers Who Dare to Question US Support for Israel
ADL Moves to Muzzle U.S. Schools

By Michael Collins Piper

The Israeli lobby has launched an all-out drive to ensure congressional passage of a bill, approved by the House and now before a Senate committee that would set up a federal tribunal to investigate and monitor criticism of Israel on American college campuses.

Ten months ago the New York-based Jewish Week newspaper claimed that the report by American Free Press that Republican members of the Senate were planning to crack down on college and university professors who were criticalof Israel was “a dangerous urban legend at best, deliberate disinformation at worst.” They were claiming that AFP lied.

However, on Sept. 17, 2003, the House Subcommittee on Select Education unanimously approved H.R. 3077, the
International Studies in Higher Education Act, which was then passed by the full House on Oct. 21. The chief sponsor
of the legislation was Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a conservative Republican from Michigan.

DANGEROUS LEGISLATION
Critics charge that the bill is dangerous—a direct affront to the First Amendment and the product of intrigue by a small clique of individuals and organizations which combines the forces of the powerful Israeli lobby in official Washington.

Leading the push for Senate approval of the bill are the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, run by Abe Foxman, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee.

Also lending its support is Empower America, the neoconservative front group established by William Kristol, editor and publisher of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, which is said to be the “intellectual” journal that governs the train of foreign policy thinking in theBush administration.

One other group has lent its support: the U.S. India Political Action Committee, an Indian-American group that has been working closely with the Israeli lobby now that Israel and India are geopolitically allied.

H.R. 3077 is bureaucratic in its tone, decipherable only to those with the capacity to wade through legislative linguistics. It would set up a seven-member advisory board that would have the power to recommend cutting federal funding for colleges and universities that are viewed as harboring academic critics of Israel.

Two members of the board would be appointed by the Senate, two by the House, and three by the secretary of education, two of whom are required to be from U.S. federal security agencies. The various appointees would be selected from what The Christian Science Monitor described on March 11 as “politicians, representatives of cultural and educational organizations, and private citizens.”

FEARS ECHOED
Gilbert Merk, vice provost for international affairs and development and director of the Center for International Studies at Duke University, has echoed the fears of many when he charged that this advisory board “could easily be hijacked by those who have a political axe to grind and become a vehicle for an inquisition.”

The primary individuals promoting this effort to control intellectual debate on the college campuses are prominent and outspoken supporters of Israel and harsh critics of the Arab and Muslim worlds. They are:
• Martin Kramer, a professor of Arab studies at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University in Israel;
• Stanley Kurtz, a contributor of ex-CIA man William F. Buckley Jr.’s bitterly anti-Arab National Review Online and a research fellow at the staunchly pro-Israel Hoover Institution; and
• Daniel Pipes, founder of the pro-Israel Middle East Institute and its affiliate, Campus Watch, an ADL-style organization that keeps tabs on college professors and students who are—or are suspected of being—critics of Israel.

These three, along with the Israeli lobby, are claiming that they are fighting “anti-Americanism” as it is being taught on the college campuses.

Republicans in Congress have joined this chorus, preferring to allow their constituents to think that this is an “America First” measure.

Juan Cole of the History News Network responds to this extraordinary twist on reality saying that the claim of “anti-
Americanism” is intellectually dishonest.

“What they mean . . . if you pin them down is ambivalence about the Iraq war, or dislike of Israeli colonization of the West Bank, or recognition that the U.S. government has like al Qaeda or Saddam. None of these positions is ‘anti-American,’ and any attempt by a congressionally appointed body to tell university professors they cannot say these
things—or that if they say them they must hire someone else who will say the opposite—is a contravention of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

The promoters are also suggesting that this legislation would, according to the American Jewish Committee, “enhance intellectual freedom on campus by enabling diverse viewpoints to be heard.” Of course, the legislation would do precisely the opposite, say critics.

Lisa Anderson of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs said in response that “this plan . . . is not about diversity, or even about the truth.”

Ms. Anderson does not cite the role of the Israeli lobby,but instead targets conservative Republicans who are acting
as the Israeli lobby’s surrogates and says that this plan is “about the conviction of conservative political activists that
the American university community is insufficiently patriotic, or perhaps simply insufficiently conservative.”

What she should be saying is that these Republicans who are carrying water for Israel are concerned that universities
are “insufficiently pro-Israel.”

The Republican House members who originally joined Hoekstra in co-sponsoring this legislation should be named for the record. They are: John A. Boehner (Ohio), John R. Carter (Texas), Tom Cole (Oklahoma), James Greenwood (Penn.), Howard (Buck) McKeon (Calif.), Patrick J. Tiberi (Ohio) and Joe Wilson (South Carolina).

Americans will not be able to find out how their representatives voted on the bill. Hoekstra asked for a suspension of the House rules, which was approved, making it possible for the controversial measure to be passed an unrecorded “voice vote.” There is no record of how individual House members voted or if they even voted at all.

Published on Thursday, June 12, 2008 by TruthDig.com
Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment
by Gore Vidal
On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment — he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials — we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much — you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons — two and a half million Americans are prisoners — what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by his administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.

Even if you and I were lawyers, we’d be appalled at Nasty Pelosi’s…substitution of greed for principle in “justifying” her traducing the American Constitution. She even got Gore Vidal’s goat:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/12/9579/

Cuba Libre!